IT WAS impressive, but can it make a difference? Representatives of more than 150 countries met at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on Tuesday to discuss climate change. And it wasn’t just government leaders present&colon; figures from big business and civil society were there too.

“Far more people believe that climate change is happening and is caused by human emissions,” primatologist Jane Goodall told New Scientist. “Whether we can act fast enough, I don’t know.”

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon convened the summit in an effort to boost targets for cutting emissions worldwide. Leaders in their respective fields were asked to make commitments to help keep global temperature increases below 2° C. They addressed agriculture, cities, energy, financing, forests, industry and transport, and how to make these resilient as warming occurs. “If we want to keep [warming] to 2° C globally, two-thirds of fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground,” says Corinne Le Quéré of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich, UK.

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The programme also featured discussions of climate science, health, economics and the views of indigenous and vulnerable peoples.

The talks formed part of preparations for a new climate agreement to be signed in Paris, France, next year. Preparations for Paris will continue in December at the Lima Climate Change Conference in Peru.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Climate talks ramp up”

EMMA WATSON isn’t the only one speaking out on gender balance this week. The lack of women in clinical trials is being addressed by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). It announced on Tuesday that it is giving &dollar;10.1 million to 80 scientists to explore the effect of sex differences in various medical conditions, including drug addiction, migraine and stroke.

Despite numerous calls for change, inequality in the lab persists. Researchers generally prefer to study single-sex groups in the hope that this limits variability between experiments. Traditionally, females have been given short shrift because hormonal cycles need to be considered at every stage of the process – whether in clinical trials or animal studies.

Female hormonal cycles need to be considered at every stage – in human trials and mouse studies

However, women are known to respond differently to men to a number of treatments and drug regimes. This, plus over-reliance on male research subjects, has been found to have a negative impact on women’s health.

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The NIH money is part of a broader move to include more female participants not only in human trials, but also mouse experiments and cell lines. NIH policies announced in May included training for researchers in how to minimise bias in experiments and a requirement for funding applicants to report plans for gender balance.

SCOTLAND’S vote last week to remain part of the UK has left many scientists breathing easier. But the result divided the science community and the public alike.

“I am thrilled,” says Margaret Frame, director of science at the Edinburgh Cancer Research Centre. “This ensures that biomedical research – and Scotland’s great achievements in delivering on this in the past – will continue unchecked.”

Scottish residents rejected independence, with a 55 per cent ‘no’ vote. Although one scientist told New Scientist he was “mighty relieved”, another expressed disappointment and suggested that an independent Scotland could have built on its strengths to carve out a global profile in high-quality science.

Such ideas convinced too few. “Although the ‘yes’ camp offered to maintain the international competitiveness of Scottish research, there was considerable uncertainty in the minds of leading academics that this could be delivered,” says Steve Beaumont at the University of Glasgow.

Previous missions saw evidence that Mars was once warm and wet – a friendly environment for life. But the planet changed. The orbiters will try to pin down when and why that happened.

MAVEN’s task will be to figure out what happened to Mars’s air, while MOM – also known as Mangalyaan (“Mars craft” in Hindi) – will monitor the planet’s weather, photograph the surface and map mineral distribution.

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Both craft are arriving just in time to watch what promises to be the fiercest meteor shower ever recorded on Mars. It will be sparked when comet Siding Spring brushes past the planet in mid October, coming within 173,000 kilometres of the surface.

LIVING in space doesn’t come cheap. A report from NASA’s internal auditor, inspector general Paul Martin, says the agency has underestimated the cost of keeping the International Space Station running until 2024. In particular, buying flights to the ISS from private companies rather than Russia is expected to increase costs.

Last week NASA awarded contracts totalling &dollar;6.8 billion to Boeing and SpaceX, which will begin sending astronauts to the ISS on board private spacecraft in 2017. The agency buys rides on a Russian Soyuz craft for over &dollar;70 million a seat, but is under pressure from US politicians to resume launches from home soil.

NASA expects its annual spend on the ISS to increase from &dollar;3 billion to &dollar;4 billion over the next 10 years, with the largest rise coming from transportation. This estimate is unrealistic, Martin says, as it assumes Boeing and SpaceX rides will cost the same as Russian ones.

NASA may face even higher costs if international partners fail to maintain supply runs to the ISS. The European Space Agency has retired its cargo ships, and neither Japan nor Russia has committed to an extension past 2020.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Space station costs”

THE to-do list has changed, but the aim is still the same. The Sustainable Development Goals, the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, are intended to improve the lives of people around the world by, among other things, improving health and education, tackling poverty and making cities more sustainable.

The final wording will be decided next year, but the health goal has been broadly agreed&colon; “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.” Now it is a case of agreeing the details of the targets that will take us to 2030.

This week, an international group of 16 doctors and scientists added their view, saying that if global health trends continue, cutting premature deaths by 40 per cent would be a realistic target. This could be done through greater access to vaccines, efforts to combat infectious diseases such as HIV and malaria, and fewer deaths during childbirth.

New areas of focus are traffic accidents and chronic conditions such as heart disease. Cutting smoking would also help, say the authors (The Lancet, doi.org/vvq).

JAPAN’S plan to restart its whaling programme just got harpooned. From now on it will have to work much harder to convince the world that its “scientific whaling” should be allowed to continue.

That’s the upshot of a resolution passed last week at the biennial meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Portoroz, Slovenia. The IWC banned commercial whaling in 1986, but countries can apply for exemptions if they are taking whales for research purposes. Japan has long continued killing whales on those grounds, but conservationists believe this is a front for commercial whaling.

Proposed by New Zealand, and passed by 35 votes to 20, the new resolution will enforce much stricter criteria on any application to conduct whaling for research. It reinforces a March ruling by the International Court of Justice that Japan’s scientific whaling programme in Antarctica between 2005 and 2014 was illegal.

In future, Japan will need to convince the IWC that any whaling programme is “reasonable” as well as scientific. “It’s not just whether science is being done, but whether it’s science that furthers the interests of the IWC and gives information that is genuinely useful in terms of whale conservation in the future,” says Chris Butler-Stroud of Whale and Dolphin Conservation, in Chippenham, UK.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Tougher whaling rules hit Japan”